The purchase of a new home or automobile necessitates acquiring a new home or automobile insurance policy, or is likely to result in a change of rates under an existing policy. Dissatisfaction with one's current insurer may also result in a consumer shopping around for better pricing and/or services provided by another insurer. The process of obtaining an insurance quote for automobile or home insurance is generally a several step endeavor. Generally, a consumer has to decide between a number of different insurance providers and then initiate the quotation process that may include communicating with an insurance agent of the selected provider or logging onto an insurance provider's website. Generally, the agent and/or web site will then solicit a number of pieces of information from the individual consumer to help finalize a quotation. For example, for automobile insurance, information such as the drivers license number, make and model of vehicle, mileage, approximate annual use of the vehicle, how many household drivers and ages, general driving history, VIN number for vehicle to be insured, a list of the vehicle's safety and anti-theft devices, policy numbers of existing polices to potentially qualify for multi-policy discounts, address of individual, etc. may be needed to formulate an insurance quotation.
Providing this information for the quote inevitably requires some manual information entry by the agent on behalf of the consumer or by the consumer directly such as via their personal computer when interfacing with an online quoting engine. Such manual information entry is more cumbersome with today's generation of smartphones and tablet computing devices that typically do not have physical keyboards and thus require manipulation of virtual softkeys or other methods that are more error prone. Generally, the longer the quotation process takes, the more chance the potential customer will simply abandon the quote or seek other alternatives.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a system that could provide instant and accurate automobile insurance quotes without requiring any time-consuming manual entry through an easy to use, intuitive user interface. It would also be further desirable to have an automated quoting system that could intelligently utilize third party data, geo-location data and social networking data to expedite the quotation process.